Åke Hodell
1919–2000 · Swedish poet, artist and text-sound composer, former fighter pilot
Åke Hodell (Stockholm, 1919 – Stockholm, 2000) was a Swedish poet, author and artist, best known for his text-sound compositions and sound collages. He trained as a fighter pilot, but a crash during practice in 1941 kept him in hospital for several years. The experience turned him into a committed antimilitarist, a stance that runs through much of his later work.
While recovering he met the poet Gunnar Ekelöf, and in 1953 he published his first book, the poetry collection Flyende Pilot, and travelled to Rome with Ekelöf that spring. In his books he experimented with what he called elektronismer, while in the early 1960s he worked on radio and stage with text-sound pieces. His best-known work, General Busy (1963), is a concrete poem built on minimalist repetitions that satirises the way the Swedish army indoctrinated conscripts through assigned officers. Mr. Smith in Rhodesia (1969) criticises British imperialism in southern Africa, and its radio broadcast was banned for fifteen years.
Hodell also wrote and produced radio plays for Sveriges Radio, founded the publishing house Kerberos and took part in documenta 8 in Kassel in 1988. He is remembered as a key figure of Swedish text-sound art, and a three-CD retrospective of his compositions from 1963 to 1977 appeared in 2000 under his supervision.